A Very Early History of Algebraic Data Types
Been quiet around here! I’ve been putting almost all of my writing time into Logic for Programmers and my whole brain is book-shaped. Trust me, you do not want to read my 2000-word rant on Sphinx post-build LaTeX customization. But I spent the past week in a historical rabbit hole and had to share what I found. It started with Algebraic [Data] Types are not Scary, Actually. The post covers AlgDTs1 in more detail, but a quick overview is: Product types are things like (Int, Bool) or Dog(name: str, owner: Person, age: Int). They have a value for each field. Almost all modern languages have product types, usually calling them something like “structs” or “records” or “value object” or whatever. Sum types are “tagged unions”, things like Int + Nothing, Result + ErrorType,…
